I started following China’s Rise in detail from the nineties, as the West was celebrating the victory of the capitalist system after the collapse of the Socialist Block around the Soviet Union. The rented ideologues of capitalism, including most of the world media and academy, wanted us to believe that Communism is dead because it was a wrong idea (not to say evil) from the beginning. But could it be that the failure was not due to the principles of the proposed communist system but to their distorted implementation in Russia, led by brutal self-serving bureaucratic elite that found in Stalinism a new version of its former Tsarist central rule and world power-struggle?

If one prototype was flawed and failed, could another team build a better implementation?

The Riddle of the Chinese Miracle

The phenomenal development of China from one of the poorest nations on earth to the world’s leading economic power is the central feature of the world scene over the last decades. But how should it be explained? Is it because new Chinese capitalism is even more exploitative and ruthless, as many critics from both left and right want us to think? Or is there something different, maybe they are doing something right? Could it be that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party learned how to initiate and control economic development in a more scientific way, synchronizing social economy, market forces and some capitalist initiatives, inducing them all to drive its grand plan, instead of unleashing the destructive rule of Greed?

One special characteristic of the Capitalist system are cyclical booms and busts. As capital is in constant movement in search of wider profit margins, investment is flowing into the most profitable sectors. This creates over-capacity, which causes a fall in prices and profits, which in turn causes withdrawal of investment, destruction of productive forces, layout of workers and so on. Finally the reduced production can’t meet the demand in the market, prices, profits, production and employment surge again, toward the inevitable next bust.

Somehow China’s economic development over the last decades succeeded to avoid these cyclical crises that continue to haunt the capitalist system like seasonal storms. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was not a typical cyclical crisis, but it provided a good example how China played differently to avoid it. The reason for the crisis was the reckless behavior of Western bankers, taking ever greater risks to maximize profits while relying on the state to come to their rescue when their gambles fail. Western governments poured money to the broken bankers while many poor people where kicked out of their homes to restore some of the banks’ bad debts.

In China’s export oriented economy millions of workers faced the sack as Western consumers had to cut spendings. China’s government mitigated the situation by handing-out money to poor families to buy electric appliances to keep its factories going, avoiding the worst of the crisis.

China Going Global

One of the numbers that I was following closely, like many other observers, was China’s GDP, as computed by Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. According to the CIA’s “World Facts Book” China’s real GDP passed that of the US in 2014. But it was not a “photo-

World top 10 economies by GDP/PPP

finish”. Economic development goes on and according to the same source in 2016 China’s GDP was worth 21.14 trillion US$, or 14% more than the US’s 18.56 trillion and counting (see pictured table). The fact that Western economists continue to speak routinely about China as “the world’s second biggest economy” only shows that they are now in a deep state of denial.

But GDP numbers say little about the real dynamism of an economy. Maybe the single number that is most telling about a country’s success in the world economy is the value of its exports. Here China is a clear number one, with export worth 2.1 trillion US$ to the US’s 1.5. So here China is already 40% ahead of the US, and the export numbers are not corrected for distorted exchange rates.

Actually, used to support the under-dogs of the world all my life, I started feeling uneasy to be a China-fun lately. While in the nineties China’s pride was in lifting people from utmost poverty, is it not now a world bully that should be feared and contained?

The riddle of China’s internal development became a main riddle on today’s world economic and political scene. Is China just another power looking for its self-interest at the expense of others, or is it proposing to the world a different and more advanced system of cooperation?

The Crisis that Wasn’t

The British pro-capitalist crusaders in “The Economist” are one of my favorite sources for following economic analysis about China and its role in the world economy. They had a very interesting story to tell on their September 9, 2017, issue.

In an editorial named “Making sense of capacity cuts in China” they say that the main reason behind today’s relatively buoyant world economy is a drive by the Chinese government to cut capacity and production in central industries like Steel, Coal and Aluminum. According to their analysis overcapacity in these sectors led to falling prices and profits, which actually threatened a world economic crisis in 2016. Instead the Chinese government’s central planners intervened by a studied policy, setting targets for cutting capacity to restore prices, profits and healthy growth,

According to a detailed news item in the same issue, named “Capacity cuts in China fuel a commodity rally and a debate”, China’s planners simply ordered all coal mines to operate no more than 276 days throughout 2016, in a move that is apparently designed to keep most workers at work. In another detail that shows how massive China’s capacity cuts were, they mention that the planned cuts in Steel capacity equal 15 times Britain’s Steel production.

Source: The Economist

As China’s share of world production in these major industries is about 50%, its unilateral actions were enough to get the wanted effect and restart a new period of healthy economic expansion without the suffering of an unplanned crisis. And China was not so altruistic as to cause its own economy damage for the benefit of the world economy. As The Economist reports, its managed capacity cuts enabled it in an orderly way to close the less productive facilities, changing its industrial mix be more technologically advanced, such increasing its world economic leadership even farther.

The story of the world economic crisis that was avoided in 2016 may illustrate one of the most significant changes in the world economic system – a big step toward a world economy with Chinese Characteristics.

What do we learn from it about where the world is going?

When I was young, in the seventies, the cold war was still raging. We told a lot of cold war jokes, some of them I still remember. One such “black” joke said that the optimists are learning Russian, while the pessimists are learning Chinese.

Don’t look from the windows!

There are many reasons to be pessimistic today. It is enough to see the massacre in Halab (Aleppo) and to know that there is nobody in the world today that is ready to act to prevent the mass killing of innocent civilians. But, looking back in history, this is how things were all the time.

But, from other aspects, the world is changing very fast. Technology is having a big impact. Today we can know at real time what is happening in almost every corner of our one and ever more connected world. Nobody has a monopoly over what we know. The Facebook revolution made ordinary people write and publish. Friends, as we are all friends now, can decide which writings deserve to be spread.

Changes in the world’s economy and politics are just as fast and profound. Just in 1990 the US emerged from the cold war as the single unchallenged world super-power. We were told that we enter a new area characterized by the end of history as political struggle. From now on human development will be driven by market forces. It didn’t take long for this supposedly blind driver to drive our small world into a wall. For ten years now we live through a seemingly endless economic crisis…

The world is changing so fast that it is hard for us to guess where we are going. Sometimes we close our eyes as if scared to look out of the windows. The political reaction in much of the “developed” rich world is pessimistic and reactionary. Many blame the immigrants, minorities or excessive liberties.

Does it mean that the world as a whole is going back? Not necessarily, as there are other amazing developments in other parts of the world. Now it is not only the optimists that are learning Chinese but also the opportunists …

The news from China

Suddenly news about China is everywhere… The most outspoken mouthpiece of capitalism, “The Economist”, can hardly say a good word about China. But now they dedicate to china a special section, just as they have a section dedicated to the US. Lately, as Trump was elected president of the US, and it seems that he will retreat from promises to limit climate change, they wrote that the rest of the world should anyway continue the effort to save itself. After all, it is China that leads the development of renewable energy sources and clean technologies like the electric car.

Chinese people, which you could hardly meet twenty years ago, are also everywhere. In 2015 Chinese people made 120 million trips abroad, spending 292 billion dollars. In the same year more than half a million Chinese went to study in other countries (just as 7.5 million graduate locally). Chinese companies are building infrastructure in many places around the globe, many times bringing with them Chinese workers. We have seen them in Haifa, as they built the Carmel tunnels.

In 2014 China became the biggest economy in the world, according to the most accepted criteria of GDP as measured by “purchasing power parity”. For most people in the rich west, China is still too poor to look at as an inspiration. But for the majority of humanity that lives in poor third world countries, the inevitable question is whether China can show the way out of poverty?

The Chinese way

For most of history, China’s economy was the biggest in the world. Chinese traditions, attitudes and institutions are very different from the European model for historic

Examinations in imperial China

development that we were taught about. The majority of Chinese people were not enslaved but free peasants. The civil service was not a monopoly of an aristocratic, hereditary class, but a meritocracy. Centrally administered exams were the key to jobs in the state apparatus, from the bottom to almost the top. Children from toiling families were studying in order to get up the social ladder.

While socialism became the official system in Russia it was painted by the local culture. The local elite, trained by the previous Tsarist rule, was happy to have modern justification for central control and totalitarian rule. China’s communist party, after the first upheavals, returned to concentrate on pragmatic development and the Confucian goal of “Social Harmony”. Relying on the centuries’ long tradition of a “serving elite”, the Chinese government succeeded to lead the biggest ever economic and social leap-forward in Human history.

The market and the plan

Adam Smith, the British economist, preached that it is the self-interest of people that make them cooperate productively. Neoliberal economists try to convince us that if we loosen the chains of the state, free market forces will drive the economy forward for the benefit of all. But when the inherent greediness of capitalist companies is let loose, they easily distort the free market for their profit and impoverish everybody else. The new Chinese model tries to harness market forces and capitalist initiatives to the service of society by keeping them away from political control.

GDP estimation – by the CIA “World Facts Book”

On the international level China is also offering a new model of mutual development. It is now the main economic partner for many countries all over the world. The capitalist multi-nationals invest in third world countries with a single goal – to get as much profit as fast as possible. Because of political instability they tend to avoid long term investment that will not bring fast profits. China’s state-led economic cooperation is based on the notion that only through mutual development there can be long term profit. They invest huge sums (and expertise) in developing infrastructure, education and health.

Western powers always pose themselves as the great example that everybody should learn from, and try to dictate conditions to all their poor “partners”. China just cooperate with everybody and makes a point of not telling other people how to manage their affairs. Either they don’t want us to learn the secret of success or they think that deeds are louder than words.

You called your blog “bombing4peace”, so I may assume that you intend to expose some of the annoying and dangerous contradictions in our world order. I know you experienced and suffered a lot from the contradictions of our distorted society. I really hope you will have the time and passion to bring more of your experience and reflections into writing.

To be more specific, I wanted to celebrate your new-born blog by relating to your first post.

You named it “I don’t want to ‘work to live’ or ‘live to work’”… At first glance it may look like an expression of “laziness” of a spoiled youth that don’t want to be enlisted to the mass slave-labor (or wage-labor) market. In the post you go much beyond your personal choices and propose a new world economic order, based on universal division of the really necessary work (maybe 4 hours’ work, 4 days a week) in order that everybody in the world will be able to live in dignity and still have a lot of free time and control of their life choices.

* * *

The belief and knowledge that “Another World is Possible” is an important part of our self-defense mechanism against our enslavement to the system.

Fighting for a better world is not only a matter of choice, but it is a necessity. You pose the question “how much work is really necessary?” In our age things are changing fast, and the answer to this question is also changing…

On my first year working in the factory (as a computer programmer), more than 30 years ago, our work week was shortened by a quarter of an hour, at the initiative of the management (We were never allowed to organize!). I thought this was the most natural thing, and that with the progress of technology we will have to work less and less. But it never happened again.

The Capitalist system failed to translate better technology and higher productivity to lesser work burden. This is in part because the system itself is causing high friction, inflicting immense extra expenses on everybody through wars, arms-race, the legal system, mass imprisonment, advertising, pollution, bureaucracy, the financial system, rampant consumerism and much more.

But unnecessary work is not the only damage caused by the Capitalist system. While the original meaning of work, as you suggest in your post, is to produce the necessities for human living, Capitalism converted work, or waged-labor, into a commodity that is traded in the market…

Our work is not ours any more. We are not making the things that we need, but we sell our working power in order to get the money to buy our needs. Our magnificent ability to change the world, our creativity, doesn’t belong to us but we are obliged to sell it in order to live… This way our work is converted from the essence of our Human lives to an activity that is forced upon us, mostly in frustrating and humiliating circumstances, many times in direct service to our most despised enemies.

This system of alienated over-work may not be sustainable much longer, even as we put all our effort unwillingly at its service.

* * *

In a special report about the world economy, dated October 4, 2014, The Economist investigates the future of work under the third industrial revolution – the consequences of the information and communication technology. It provides a wide perspective of the change that is just taking place… It estimates that about 47% of current jobs in the US may be replaced by computers or automation over the next decade. It describes how the percentage of the population employed in manufacturing has already peaked in many 3rd world countries before industrialization had the chance to pull them out of poverty.

In spite of all the amazing technological development over the last decade, productivity growth and economic development are slowing. The report goes on to describe the shrinking part that workers are getting from the hardly-expanding cake, while the rich elite are accumulating unprecedented wealth. Within the working population itself, the proportion of income of the top small minority is increasing while the fate of most workers is not improving or even getting worse. The types of available jobs is also changing, as middle-skill jobs with decent wages are most prone to be replaced by technology, and therefore, most workers are pressed to the lower skill low-paid jobs.

The prospect that the report is predicting for the majority of Humanity who live from their work is dire: “a generation of workers, the world over, is facing unemployment and stagnant pay”… By treating work as a commodity that workers must sell for their living, they conclude that there will not be work enough for everybody and the price of Human working-power (like any commodity whenever its supply exceeds demand) will continue tumbling.

* * *

We learn in High Tech that every problem is an opportunity.

Capitalism is a system that designates most of humanity to poverty, just because work (defined as the caring for peoples’ needs) can be done ever more efficiently. This system IS lunatic while yours proposals are pure logic.

Actually, what we are missing is political power to the people. As the Capitalists are controlling the state and the international system, they utilize them to their self interest – to make more money at the expense of the vast majority. More and more people today understand that only through political power this process may be stopped or even reversed. You can see it in the mass movement to raise the minimum wage.

If putting your effort in order to create better conditions for Human livelihood is the original meaning of work, than working for political change, working for a just social order, for Socialism, is the most necessary and productive work in our times.

You might even discover that writing your blog is also work… I hope it will not dissuade you from going on with this blessed effort.

* * *

To finish with some real-world hard facts about work and working times, I wanted to mention also a recent BBC inquiry into working conditions in the supply-chain used to produce Apple’s iPhones.

They report appalling condition in a Pegatron factory near Shanghai, with workers working up to 16 hours a day. They also report the exploitation of children in dangerous conditions in mines in Indonesia.

As all big companies expertise today in “Social Responsibility,” Apple was quick to reply that is making a lot of progress to assure decent working conditions along all its supply chain… They claimed to have reached 93% compliance with their generous goal of no more than 60 working-hours a week!!!

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Since the fall of the Soviet Union, I was following closely events in China. Is there any chance that Socialism there will prove more successful? Can economic reform preserve the gains of Socialism while providing the dynamism of development?

I used to read anything that was written about China in the BBC and The Economist, as well as some items from China Daily and assorted other sources. For a long time the Bourgeois press simply were “voodoo like” predicting the fall of (what they saw as) the false economic development in China.

In the mid 2000’s, the Economist was full of articles sayings that, well, they must admit, China is good at commanding millions of workers to the production lines, hence its manufacturing prowess. But, as all experts at the Economist stressed, China’s financial system is totally defunct. Of course, state-employed bureaucrats couldn’t rival the sophisticated money-allocation of the top heroes of Financial Capital, whose bonuses run at the tens of millions. Then came the Credit Crunch, Sub-Prime, Lehman and Greece.

My brother was one of the first businessmen to see that the future is in China. Over the last 20 years, he lives in China and tries to do business there. In a family reunion some years ago, he was asked by another relative what he was doing in China. “I’m implementing the 11th Five-Year Plan” was the straight answer. Because that’s what good business people that only want to make money are doing in China.

As I’m stuck here in one of the most Capitalist states, working for my living for a big multinational, what I’m doing most of the time is “creating value for the share holders”. At least this is what the management is tirelessly and proudly reminding us… So, as you might see, what you’re doing is, many times, not so much dependent on your beliefs, but you must play by the rules… This is why it is so important who is setting the rules.

In a hundred ways, China’s rise is now influencing our lives and events all over the globe. For a long period I followed it coming, but now it is common knowledge. Yet this most significant development, the 1-ton gorilla in the world’s salon, is little understood. The Capitalists masters and the huge army of academic and media lackeys are in natural self-denial of their own sunset. But many Socialists are likewise in a state of denial – this is not the new world they were thinking or dreaming about. In this blog, as I see China’s rise as a big opportunity for all oppressed people and nations, I’ll add my observations to the unevitable process of coming to grip with the new world order.